Metal Armor, is non-med outdated?

So, with all this imbuing, reforging ect... Why is the coolest looking armor the most useless because of mana regen penalty. There seems to be ZERO reason for "Balance" to keep metal wearers at a disadvantage with mana. Any chance we can remove this non-med nonsence, its 2012 and theres no reason not to let people wear what they want, ESPECIALLY now with reforging. Can any Dev's give us a good answer as to why there is STILL a meddable penalty to metal armor?

on the other hand there is NO penalty for wearing med-iable armor so this is actually a unbalanced thing..... the logic of dev is really weird sometimes....

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I don't think their intent is to have them out of balance. You have to remember each incremental change in the game had impacts on other systems. I think the devs are first trying to address the ways to get high-end colored ingots. The Void Pool rewards are an effort toward that end. I suspect a soon change will be to adjust the properties of all resources and armor pieces to balance them out. It is probably a matter of priority. Everyone agrees metal armor doesn't have the usefulness it once did.

So, with all this imbuing, reforging ect... Why is the coolest looking armor the most useless because of mana regen penalty. There seems to be ZERO reason for "Balance" to keep metal wearers at a disadvantage with mana. Any chance we can remove this non-med nonsence, its 2012 and theres no reason not to let people wear what they want, ESPECIALLY now with reforging. Can any Dev's give us a good answer as to why there is STILL a meddable penalty to metal armor?

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I'm confuse here. I know, you can't use meditation with metal armor but do mana regen mod not work with it? Also focus do work with metal armor as far I know. I may be wrong.
If metal armor got more basis resist than now and some mods like we see on wooden armor and weapon, I think we again would see more smiths.
Also remember, the armor are meant for warriors, not for mages.

Focus does work with metal armor but te mana regen from it is still very small. Also i understand metal is for warriors and not mages, but remember this, it still cost my warrior just as much mana as a mage to fight effectively between warrior spells and specials, and leeches are crap in PvP, so i think te metal armor for warriors theory is out of touch with the current UO armor system.

Stratics Veteran

the passive mana regen from both your int stat and med skill is cut by using metal armor as well, on humans even without any "real" med this is especially bad, you lose a lot of regen.

Once upon a time UO's armor system actually made sense, back then you might remember that metal armor had more resist (AR at the time, no elementals) than leather, with plate being the highest. On AOS launch when they changed the system, plate still had higher phys resist than normal leather but leather was still overall better due to more and more mana requirements being added for warriors (especially with the new chiv/necro). Basicly UO's armor system has been completely broken since then...

yes smithing would be great, seeing new metal armors on vendors instead of same old leather, back to a more individualized (spelt right? spelt.....new word) look for each player. It really would add a lot more diversity to what we see, not to metion how badass a mace weilding disarm mage could look in full pheonix red plate with maybe some purple or blue trimmings. Fix metal, fix viewable or non viewable robes, and we can really start seeing some cool looking people again, especially with these new dyes.

OK I tested it.
First metal plate armor and no focus on Elf char, passive mana regen or very very slow
Then on char with gm focus, now I did get passive mana regen, even when 120 focus would had been better
Tryed then a leather armor suit, no diff in passive mana regen as far I could see
Then on char with GM focus and 6 MR, it was faster than without the 6 MR, almost 2x so fast as with leather armor with out MR

Stratics Veteran

OK I tested it.
First metal plate armor and no focus on Elf char, passive mana regen or very very slow
Then on char with gm focus, now I did get passive mana regen, even when 120 focus would had been better
Tryed then a leather armor suit, no diff in passive mana regen as far I could see
Then on char with GM focus and 6 MR, it was faster than without the 6 MR, almost 2x so fast as with leather armor with out MR

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try it on a human character on TC1, you'll see a huge difference (set a higher int too)

MR from focus is not changed by armor type, only the MR from Med/Int calculation. MR from suit is seperate also, armor type has no bearing on how that works

Then it's only the Int calculation there is a problem and maybe human chars. I can grow the resources to put 12 MR on a suit and more MI do give me more mana too, so not that bad.
I think valorite ingots should have 2 MR as bonus on armor pieces

Stratics Veteran

yeah, but that 12 MR you can put on the suit stacks with the natural, that still leaves plate giving you considerably less mana than leather imbued the exact same. Sure though ,it's "not so bad" if you're willing to spend more and use up precious imbue slots that could be used for other mods, but in the age of super artifacts being under-geared in pvp...even on siege...is death, and that extra mana regen can make the difference between getting in one last AI or running out of mana and having to back off.

Stratics Veteran

it's not that big of a difference if you don't rely on high INT. meditation is very overrated in pvp combat. sure, if you want MAX mana regen, go with leather, but many warrior artifacts are pieces that are NOT medable, like the SSI legs, and the breastplate of the berserker.

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